Comlent, headquartered in Shanghai, announced that it has successfully developed a whole radio-frequency integrated circuit (RFIC) transceiver and power amplifier (PA) chip set for PHS/PAS handsets.

The chip and board level evaluations reportedly show excellent performance and good sound quality for the handset. Comlent has provided samples to its potential customers for their new handset designs.

This is the first complete RFIC transceiver, one of the most difficult ICs to design, being sampled by a Chinese company to date.

China currently has nearly 70 million PHS/PAS (also called "Little Smart") subscribers, and experienced an annual growth of 25 to 30 million handsets per year in 2003 and 2004. New market drivers such as the physical separation between the phone number card and handset as well as the enablement of short messaging between PHS/PAS and GSM/CDMA mobile handsets may augment the growth of the handset market.